Xander Dumaine - Xander Dumaine

Trees

Being into woodworking and tree identification simultaneously is super problematic. I want to use trees and save them at the same time. Another frustration is that lumber folks and tree science folks do not agree. The most popular lumber tree in the Western United States is the Douglas-fir (the dash

Camping!

This weekend, Atlas and I went camping at Stone Mountain State Park, in North-Western North Carolina. Bailey's not big on camping, and we don't have any air pads or air-mattresses, so I told her she was welcome to have a couple days off and just hang out at home with

Autophagy

One of the benefits of fasting and exercise is activating autophagy: the process by which your body "hunkers down" and recycles junk build-up. Learn about the science behind autophagy, how to reach it, and why it's necessary for a long and healthy life. AutophagyThese are kind of a big deal

Myths About Drinking Water

LifeOmic - the company I work for - has a high focus on wellness and health science, with all of our apps having scientific backing. I brought up that hydration would make a good additional wellness "pillar" to our existing 5 of Vegetables, Mindfulness, Physical Activity, Sleep, and Fasting. It

webrtc

WebRTC with async/await

Basic WebRTC connection setup can be confusing to understand, and there really is a lot going on that is black magic. Even so, just getting a single page connection going is confusing. I wanted to try writing some async/await code to test out browser compatibility and try different patterns,

Greece 2017

technology

Hacking Alexa to send Arbitrary Texts

I finally jumped on the Alexa bandwagon this week, and picked up an Amazon Dot. I got the Dot, because it's a lot cheaper than the Echo, and I already have an old speaker hanging around that I can use with it. Just to clarify - the Dot is a

webrtc

WebRTC Phone User Experience

Last year, &Yet wrote a great series of blog posts with AT&T about WebRTC UX. We love to see this kind of focus in the WebRTC community, because it shows an intersection of classic technology and modern web experience. Many of those posts, however, focus on the

books

The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoevsky

Note: Due to translation differences and conventions, some names (including that of the author himself) may be spelled differently than in other sources. The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoevsky is a classic drama. The book is largely comprised of major dramatic scenes (which, incidentally, lends itself well to adaptation as a

software

Simple Image Lazy Loading with Ghost

I recently put up a post that happened to contain a bunch of images, and realized that the initial experience was kind of crappy, due to loading all of them at once. There were really two things I could do to improve this: lazy load images, and have lower res

experiences

A Year In Review 2015

2015 was a year of ups and downs, but I came out on top. I tried a lot of new things, and survived pretty happy and pretty healthy. Some notable events took place this year - life changing events that I'll probably never forget. Some of them were really incredible,

webrtc

Surviving Mandatory HTTPS in Chrome

Chrome 47 brought a new change, and one that's caused a lot of confusion and irritation for some WebRTC developers. Despite the warnings and PSAs from the WebRTC team at Google, and the console deprecation warning, some didn't get the message that getUserMedia now requires that the requesting app be

software

Choosing a mobile platform to target

As a mobile developer, I often get questions like "Nice site! When's the mobile app coming?" or "we really need an app for this specific need, which platform should we use? or even "I want to make an app, but I don't know what yet -

javascript

Using Webtask.io for Secure API Tokens

Single Page Applications are awesome. One downside is that static SPAs often have to authenticate with some service or API in order to coordinate some communication, access some data, or connect to other users, and that connection has an inherent security risk: How do you connect to a secure service

finances

Stacked Snowball Debt Repayment

Paying down debt is hard. I don't want to go into all the details about how and why to pay down debt because other people have already done that better than I could. I just want to throw out the method I've been using since I first acquired debt, before

software

Improved Chrome Extension UX, again

A few months ago, Philipp Hancke from &yet posted Improved Screensharing UX on Talky which specifically addresses the UX for first-time users. The problem being addressed is threefold: In Chrome, desktop capture for screen sharing is enabled via the desktopCapture Chrome extension API, so when first-time users try to

software

Passions and Tools

I'm of the (unpopular) opinion that being excited about the framework or platform you're using as the focal point of the work you're doing, you're focused on the wrong thing. People are going nuts about Ember and React, .NET coming to Mac, Rails or Django. All of these are just

travel

A Guide to New Orleans Coffee

New Orleans is oft talked about as a party city - and indeed it is - but it is also much more. We went armed with recommendations from some friends and co-workers, but without any solid plans - just a list of ideas of things to do or places to

climbing

Rocky Face

Yesterday I had the opportunity to climb at Rocky Face Mountain Recreation Area. Rocky Face is a man-made crag. It's the remnants of an old quarry that has been cleaned up, bolted, and permitted for climbing. I enjoyed Rocky Face a lot. The climbing can be a bit different from

technology

Tesla Still Can't Harvest Lightning

Today, in a shocking moment at a Tesla press conference Elon Musk, CEO of the electric car manufacturer, admits "No, we don't know how to harvest lightning yet." In the wake of being named Consumer Reports top overall car for a second year in a row, investors were

climbing

Clarification on some climbing terms

A few weeks ago, Kevin Jorgeson and Tommy Caldwell completed a grueling 19 day free climb of the Dawn Wall, a face of Yosemite National Park's gargantuan mountain El Capitan. I wanted to write a brief clarification of what constitutes different types of climbs: Free Climb: Climbing a wall using

technology

How to Identify a Scam On Social Media

Scams and Phishing are pretty common in email, and email providers like Gmail, Yahoo, and Outlook are getting better and better at letting you know when an email might not be totally legitimate, or might put you at risk. They can do this because there are a number of very

charity

Give

I'm raising $4000 for the San Francisco HIV Foundation and cycling 545 miles to do it. Every year, thousands of cyclists raise money to fight HIV and ride from San Francisco to Los Angeles as a part of the AIDS/LifeCycle. Unfortunately every year, thousands of more people are infected

climbing

Off The Wall

I (not so) recently self-diagnosed myself with an A2-Pulley injury. It's the most common injury for rock climbers, and most commonly occurs in rock climbers. An A2-Pulley is the fibrous soft tissue that wraps all the way around your finger, binding your tendon close to the bone. It keeps your

climbing

A Day on the Mountain

I woke up in the cool morning, my face open to the morning air, with the smell of pine and new spring growth on Pilot Mountain. The new growth covers the mountain floor, renewing life after the annual burn. I rolled out of my hammock and got ready for the